Men's Lives

by Peter Matthiessen

  I asked Calvin’s son Danny, who was helping load the net, if he intended to be a fisherman, and without hesitation this twelve-year-old boy said, “No.” He shook his head firmly. “No,” Danny Lester said again. “Won’t be nothing to fish for.” And Donnie Eames said, “Kind of sad to hear that from a Posey, ain’t it? When I was his age, the one thing that I wanted to do, that was go fishin.”

  On Sunday afternoon, May 12, Lindy Havens and Eddie Trufanoff went out on Gardiners Bay in Lindy’s sharpie to try out Lindy’s new outboard motor and perhaps pick out some locations for his gill-nets. Lindy wore knee boots, and E.T. wore the heavy black waders he had used on the beach the previous spring. A southeast wind was blowing, and the day was cold, but in the lee of Hedges Bank, between Cedar Point and Sammis Beach, where the Northwest Woods overlooks the water, the bay was calm.

  Lindy must have been teasing E.T. as usual, for the two were heard shouting and laughing by people in the housing development above. The motor, which had apparently cut out, now started up again, and a few moments later, a man standing on the stair that leads down to the rocky beach heard the sharpie suddenly accelerate. Glancing over, he saw both men floundering in the boat’s wake.

  The man on shore was casually acquainted with Ed Trufanoff, and reported that E.T. had gone over first, since he saw his reddish head twenty or more yards farther back in the boat’s wake than Lindy’s dark one. Though Lindy was a veteran boatman, it appeared that he had lost his balance and gone over the side when he spun the boat hard to retrieve the other man. Since the two were less than two hundred yards offshore, the onlooker considered swimming out to help them—he told me he had once been a lifeguard—but he knew from recent experience, out clamming, that he would go numb in this cold water once he was in over his waist and would never reach them.

  The man with the dark hair was treading high in the water with his shoulders out, dodging the sharpie, which was making tight circles. A few seconds later, when the witness ran to telephone for help, Lindy seemed to be making his way toward E.T., who was flailing desperately without making a sound. Glancing back just once, the witness thought he saw them both, but he wonders now if what he thought was E.T.’s head, low in the water, was actually a pot buoy, and if E.T. went under before Lindy reached him. Perhaps Lindy never got there at all, for when the witness got back to the stair less than three minutes later, both heads were gone. (Later Lindy’s old friend Dominick Grace would ask him mildly, Why didn’t you go in after them? Dom-Dom nodded his head understandingly when the man explained.)

  During those three minutes, a second witness who had come to the cliff edge saw one man—almost certainly Lindy—waving his arms and crying out for help. Then the bay was still but for the empty sharpie, which spun in tight circles until she ran aground, an hour later.

  Apparently the balky motor had been started up in gear and at full throttle, kicking the skiff out from beneath the upright Eddie. Apparently E.T. knew how to swim, but even a strong swimmer would have trouble staying afloat in heavy waders, which are difficult to take off in deep water. He appears to have surfaced only briefly, whereas Lindy seems to have been in good control. Perhaps Lindy hollered when he felt himself growing paralyzed in the cold May water, and very likely his heart stopped, since if his lungs had filled in drowning, it seems unlikely that he would have floated. Yet he went under at least briefly, since both men on the cliff edge say he disappeared. By the time his body was recovered about twenty-five minutes after the accident (by a private boat out of Three Mile Harbor that answered a “May Day” emergency call on its ship-to-shore radio), the southeast wind had drifted him several hundred yards to the northwest, off Tom Lester’s fish trap.

  “Salt water and drinkin just don’t mix,” said a bayman on the Dory Rescue Squad, which tried to coordinate the search for E.T.’s body. The police divers worked mainly in the offshore stretch where the drifting body was recovered, despite the first witness’s strong feeling, relayed over the baymen’s radio, that Trufanoff must still be on the bottom at the inshore spot right off the cliff stair where he disappeared. “I clam there all the time, and there’s no current, not inshore,” the unhappy man told me a few days later, still upset by the thought that there was some way he might have helped. “I feel sure he’s right there now. I liked E.T.; you couldn’t help but like him. He didn’t have anything much to say but he was always smiling. It gives me a funny feeling about going clamming, knowing he’s out there.” Eddie Trufanoff’s body washed up on Sammis Beach two Sundays later.

  A memorial service for Sidney Lindbergh Havens, one of the best fishermen on the East End, was held in a funeral home on Newtown Lane in the late morning of May 16, an hour which permitted most baymen to attend. There were copious flowers and floral wreaths, some in the shapes of fish and anchors, and the room was crowded. The Amagansett Fire Department, of which Lindy was a member, carried his flag-draped casket to the Oakwood Cemetery, where he was buried toward mid-day of a soft spring morning. Three old friends from the haul-seine crews, Don Eames, Sr., Pete Kromer, and Milt Miller, were among his pall-bearers, and Milt was chewing on his lip as the casket was lowered into the Bonac earth.

  Leaving the cemetery, Milt put his arm around my shoulder, and we walked along a little. “Kind of a sad day,” I said. “Old Lindy had a lot of spirit.” But Milt had grieved and made his peace with his friend’s death and was on his way back to the bay, which is just what Lindy would have wanted. He nodded politely at my glum remark before cocking his head to look at me with that wry squint. “Well, I don’t guess none of us are goin to get away with it, now are we, Pete? Try as we might.” I laughed quietly, and he laughed, too, shaking his head. It was what Lindy might have said at Milt Miller’s funeral, and we both felt better.

  NOTES

  PREFACE

  1 Henry B. Bigelow and William C. Schroeder, Fishes of the Gulf of Maine, United States Fish and Wildlife Service, Washington, D. C., 1953.

  2 Clam seeding and planting programs funded by East Hampton Town also benefit the numerous noncommercial clammers.

  3 The finback, largest whale on earth except the blue whale, attains a length of seventy to eighty feet.

  CHAPTER 1

  1 Lion Gardiner’s son David, born at Saybrook in 1636, was the first white child born in the Connecticut colony; his daughter Elizabeth, born on the Isle of Wight, was the first child of English parents born in what is now called New York State.

  2 Like North Sea and like Riverhead (at the head of the Great River), Maidstone was a Kentish name; the original Maidstone is a seaport ten miles up the River Medway from the North Sea.

  3 Originally Easthampton; Southampton remains one word.

  4 Jason Epstein and Elizabeth Barlow, East Hampton: A History and Guide, Medway, Sag Harbor, 1975; rev. ed., Vintage Books, 1985.

  5 Daniel Denton, A Brief Description of New York, 1670.

  6 William Wallace Tooker, The Indian Place-Names on Long Island, Putnam, 1911.

  7 The Panama, out of Sag Harbor.

  8 Within a century of the first landings from Great River, there were only four hundred Indians left in all Long Island. In 1759 the Indians were pleading for the right to cut winter firewood, and in 1778 the New York State Superintendent of Indian Affairs felt obliged to request the citizens of Montauk to honor Indian fishing rights established in the early covenants, which were being ignored to the same degree as the Indians themselves. In 1791 Thomas Jefferson, making a study of Long Island’s disappearing Indians, recorded a few Montauk words, but by now, as John Lion Gardiner would write a few years later (1798), the Montauk tribe was “small and of mixed breed, few speaking the language.”

  As for the remnant Shinnecocks, they were widely exploited as slave labor and many would marry African slaves, who had arrived with the first settlers.

  In early days, the Indians’ land was seized because they were “savages” who were letting it go to waste; it was subsequently said that because they had “lost their
culture” (which was untrue), there was no legal basis for aboriginal claims. Stephen “Talkhouse” Pharaoh, a whaler, Civil War soldier, and one of the last of the Montauks, passed away in 1879. “I was quite disappointed to find only two families of Indians,” wrote Emily Strong, whose father became keeper of the Montauk Light in 1885. “And they had white wives, so they didn’t interest us much.” The last of the Montauks had assumed that the rights to Indian Field, near Montauk Point, guaranteed them in the terms of the 1660 sale, had not been compromised in 1879, when Talkhouse died and Arthur Benson, a real estate developer, acquired all Montauk for $151,000. In 1895 suit was brought against the Bensons by the last stubborn families referred to by Mrs. Strong, and for some years afterward the Fowlers and Pharaohs continued to use ancestral lands of which they felt themselves to be a part, despite relentless rulings against them; in 1910 the courts decreed that all property claims by Montauk Indians were invalid, on the grounds that they no longer existed as a tribe. Maria (pronounced mo-RYE-ah) Fowler Pharaoh Banks, widow of Stephen Pharaoh and last “queen” of the Montaukets, born at Indian Fields about 1848, was promised eighty dollars a year by Benson’s son for forfeiting her claim upon the land; she moved off Montauk when her husband died, only to have her house burned down and the payments stopped. (“Plenty of law but very little justice,” wrote Wyandank Pharaoh, in a letter of 1916 to the East Hampton Star; he died five years later.) “Those were the happy days and how I have longed to be back home and live the same life over again, but it is too late now, those days will never return,” she said, not long before her death in the late thirties.

  9 Also called trot lines, or long lines.

  10 Now called Devon, a summer haven for small yachts.

  11 Settled by John Osborn in 1668. (The “up-street” members of the clan have added an “e” to their name.)

  12 The Bennetts, in fact, are the Gardiners’ only peers among the first families of the South Fork. The first of this clan, a Dorset man from the Channel coast, arrived as a servant to Lion Gardiner in 1639; in 1723 a Samuel Bennett was acquitted of charges of murdering a Gardiner while the two were hunting deer at Three Mile Harbor. Among local families, this one is perhaps most insular; in the nineteen fifties, certain Bonac Bennetts had never been as far west as New York City, which has been regarded with suspicion by the local community since the reign of the damn Dutch and perfidious British.

  13 G. Brown Goode, The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States, Washington, D. C, 1887.

  14 Today the Atlantic right whale, reduced to an estimated three hundred individuals, may be the rarest whale on earth. The mother and calf reported off the ocean beach in early January 1985 were the first seen off the South Fork in many years.

  CHAPTER 2

  1 Probably bearberry.

  2 For an account of shore whaling, see Whale Off, by Everett Edwards, Jr., and Jeannette Edwards Rattray, Stokes, 1933.

  3 See interview with Milton Miller by John Eilertsen for the Town Marine Museum Archives; also Eilertsen’s interview with Milt Miller and Peter Matthiessen.

  4 Boxes made of sugar pine holding six hundred pounds.

  5 The tough long clams, or skimmers (the big ocean form of the same species is called the surf clam) held onto the hook better than soft clams, or steamers, which were used only when skimmers were hard to find.

  6 Captain Clint Edwards’s dory, built in 1910 by Tom Bennett of Amagansett, may still be seen behind Stuart’s Seafood off Oak Lane in Amagansett.

  CHAPTER 3

  1 Jeannette Edwards Rattray, East Hampton History and Genealogies, Country Life Press, 1953.

  2 Like the sturgeon, the local blue crab is no longer numerous enough to constitute a commercial fishery. For a fine account of Chesapeake crabbing, see The Beautiful Swimmers by William Warner, Penguin, 1976.

  3 Seapoose (from Narragansett Indian sepoese, or “little river”) refers to the cut, or gut, periodically opened to the sea from ponds—such as Sagaponack and Georgica—that build up back of the beach where sand has blocked a freshwater stream; sea-puss, or poose, which derives from this term, is a strong rotating eddy alongshore.

  CHAPTER 4

  1 In the beam trawl, the dragger net was held open by cables from the ends of a long spar, or beam; in the otter trawl, water pressure against heavy wood “doors” at the ends of the cables holds the mouth of the net wide.

  2 No fisherman seems to know the derivation of this ancient term, which signifies intense or extreme behavior, good or bad.

  CHAPTER 5

  1 Ralph Gabriel, The Evolution of Long Island, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1921.

  2 The free-swimming larvae “set” after eight days—or up to three weeks if the water remains cold—on the hard surface of a loose cultch such as dumped jingle shells. Shell cultch, unlike rocks, is readily spread on underwater beds for efficient harvesting.

  3 Good clam rakes, like scallop dredges, are mostly handmade by craftsmen in this region, with certain distinguishing characteristics: the Port Jeff clammer, for example, has straight long teeth; the Greenport sloop dredge has a long shank with a crossbar.

  4 Sometimes called Sammy’s Beach.

  5 In state waters, it is ten per man, twenty per boat.

  6 Codium was introduced accidentally in Greenport harbor in the twenties or thirties apparently from Japan, and is now widespread on the East End; it was called Sputnik weed because it seemed (and looked) as if it might have dropped from outer space.

  7 Lighthouses were installed on Little Gull Island in 1806 and on Plum Island in 1827; both of these lights are still in operation, though no longer manned.

  8 The construction of this problematic chain, out of date so long before its own completion, eliminated an obscure species of mouse called the Gull Island vole, but an uncommon bird called the roseate tern still nests in the crumbling ruin of the gun emplacements on Gull Island, which is now owned and administered by the American Museum of Natural History.

  9 It is sometimes said that Fishers Island was named after a certain Vischer, who served the Dutch navigator Adriaen Block as a cartographer, but more likely it refers to an isle of fishers, or fishing Indians, who called the island Munnatawket (very likely these Indians were the sea-going Montauks).

  10 Like most of the beach lifeboat stations—there were twenty-eight on the Long Island shore in 1929—Georgica had been closed down after World War II, when depth finders, radar, and loran became standard equipment on oceanic vessels, and kept them from going aground in snow or fog.

  CHAPTER 6

  1 Jeannette Edwards Rattray, Ship Ashore, Coward-McCann, 1955.

  2 C. F. Waterman, Fishing in America.

  3 In this same place, twelve years before, three spies were put ashore by a German submarine that managed to strand itself for a few hours on the bar before grinding free again. The spies, reported by a young Coast Guardsman on beach patrol, were tracked to New York and Washington, and eventually executed.

  CHAPTER 7

  1 By this time the East Hampton Star was owned and edited by Arnold Rattray, who had married Captain Evvie Edwards’s daughter, but it had been sympathetic to the commercial men before this time and maintains interest and sympathy to this day, under the successive editorships of Jeannette, Everett, and Helen Rattray.

  2 Named for U.S. Submarine Chaser #17 of the Eagle Boat class, which went aground and sank west of Two Mile Hollow in 1922.

  3 Anthony Taormina, director of the Marine Fisheries Division of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

  4 Bigelow and Schroeder, Fishes of the Gulf of Maine.

  5 Until recent years, Hudson River fish were thought to confine their coastal movements to Long Island Sound east of Stratford Shoal and the south shore of Long Island west to Moriches Inlet; the bass at the east end of the Sound, entering from the east, were assumed to be Chesapeake fish. This is no longer true, if indeed it ever was.

  6 Most quotations of this passage leave
out the words “pass out of a pounde” (a fish trap), which alters the sense of it considerably.

  7 Quoted in D.S. Jordan and B.W. Evermann, American Food and Game Fishes, Doubleday, Page, New York, 1903.

  8 Bigelow and Schroeder, Fishes of the Gulf of Maine.

  9 Goode, Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States.

  10 Jordan and Evermann, American Food and Game Fishes.

  11 Paul Bailey, Long Island: A History of Two Counties, Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1949.

  CHAPTER 8

  1 Old-timers pronounce Montauk with an accented second syllable.

  2 From the Algonkian Wapaneunk, “to the east.”

  3 The iron pier had a fish trap at the end.

  4 During World War I, the Long Island Rail Road laid a cinder track parallel to its own roadbed, south of the old sand track, and this cinder track was paved in the late nineteen twenties.

  5 In 1984 there were fifty-three traps in East Hampton Town, from Culloden Point to Northwest Harbor, and about ten on the shores of Gardiners Island.

  6 A rock needle twenty-four feet below the surface, discovered the hard way by the iron ship Great Eastern that later laid the first trans-Atlantic cable.

  7 In 1781 the 161-foot British gunboat Culloden, after striking on Shagwong Reef, sank under the bluffs of Fort Pond Bay.

  8 Off this Napeague shore, the slave ship Amistad, in 1839, commandeered by its cargo under the leadership of an extraordinary African named Cinque, was taken in custody by the revenue brig Washington, thereby precipitating a political crisis and an epochal decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in the national conflict over abolition that would lead in a few years to civil war.

  9 In Australia, all bluefish are called tailors, pronounced “tielers,” apparently an old English term, still used locally for two- to three-pound bluefish.